A few highlights from our sunny vacation: If you’ve never
been to the real Venice, walking along the canals of L.A.’s Venice will give
you a tiny hint. Instead of large hotels and merchant ships as in Italy,
however, the west coast Venice is lined with incredibly expensive cottages. My
beach sketch, done in about five minutes, is notable only in that it was
painted with Pacific Ocean water in my waterbrush.

Huntington Library is not just a place to do research; it’s
also an art museum, conservatory and vast collection of gardens. Although we
were there all afternoon, we barely skimmed the surface. My favorite was the
Chinese Garden, which was reminiscent of the Lan Su Chinese Garden we saw in Portland a couple of months ago.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, is an
architectural marvel of curved lines. Not a single right angle or flat plane
can be seen anywhere, and the matte stainless steel finish gleams elegantly
(not jarringly as you might expect) against the blue sky. I was instantly
intimidated about sketching a building like that, but with only 10 minutes
available before we were to start our tour of the interior, I didn’t have time
to dawdle. I just focused on trying to capture all those crazy curves and the
building’s scale.

7/19/14 Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-jaku ink, Sailor pen (Taiko drummers)

Attending a performance of Taiko Nation, several of the
world’s leading taiko groups sharing one stage, was a highlight of the weekend.
I forgot to bring my clip-on book light
that I’ve used previously in dark performance halls, so I decided to wing it.
Sketching in the near-darkness, I didn’t bother to put on my glasses or even
look at the paper. I filled several sketchbook pages just keeping my pen moving to the magical rhythm of the drums.

We had a little time to kill before our flight home
yesterday, so we took a leisurely walk along the water at Marina del Rey. One
of my earliest and fondest memories as an outdoor urban sketcher is of the same marina two years ago(my first
summer as an urban sketcher). Brunching
at a marina restaurant, I had snuck away to sketch the many pelicans preening
on the docks. We didn’t see any pelicans this time, but the sketch I made there
yesterday turned out to be my favorite sketch of our trip. Boats, water, palm
trees, a cool marine breeze, sunshine, blue sky: quintessential L.A. at its
best.

Except for the watercolors that took a little longer, most
of these sketches were done in about 10 minutes each. (See more photos in my Los Angeles Flickr album.)

2 comments:

Wow! You sketched just about everything in LA it seems. LOL I like the one of Marina del Rey. I was there once years ago. You captured it well. What an amazing looking concert hall! Looks like you had a lot of fun. It is always good to get a way for a while.